5 Best Apps for Roommate Harmony

Welcome to the wonderful world of living with a roommate, a world that isn’t always so wonderful. Ideally, we would all get along with our roommates, there would be nothing but harmony, and the term “passive aggression” would be a foreign concept.

Unfortunately, we live in the real world where problems and tension among roommates are ever so common. As we’re looking at that garbage can with contents reaching such heights that would make Everest jealous and as we’re pretending not to see our roommate participating in X-rated PDA with their significant other who seems to think their name is on the lease, we might be shaking our heads and saying, “I wish there was an app for that.”

Guess what? There is. Keep reading to discover five apps that will transform roommate anarchy into roommate harmony.

When you are living with other people, the finances of the house are bound to get a bit jumbled. Splitwise is a simple way to organize expenses and share bills with your roommates.

By creating a group, you and your roommates will be able to stay connected while also keeping track of how much money is owed and who that money is owed to. Splitwise also offers email notifications to kindly remind you and your roommates of due charges. Say goodbye to awkward tension and utter financial bedlam.

Let’s be real. Everybody hates debt. All of us hate taking out student loans knowing we will eventually need to pay them back. The only thing worse than owing debt is owing debt to a friend, or worse, a roommate.

As a student, you eventually forget how many times your roommate has picked up the tab at dinner, or treated you to a movie after a tough exam. After all, you have a ton on your plate too. However, this might pose some problems for the roommate relationship if your roommate should mistake your forgetfulness for negligence.

IOU is here to save the day! The app will allow you to keep track of your debts, bills, and loans. It will send you notifications about upcoming and overdue debts should you forget.

Also, it works on the flip side. Does your roommate owe you money for dinner or a movie? IOU will send email reminders to them as well, while also keeping a record of your financial history.

Did your parents ever set up a rewards system for whatever chores you did in the house? Or, were you like me in the sense that living in a house was the reward for completing chores?

Either way, Chorma is here to organize and add incentive to keeping up the pristine levels around the place. The app provides a simple and rewarding way to keep up with chores around the house. The app allows you to assign or claim responsibilities around the house and do you want to know the best part? By doing chores, you gain “Chorma” points which you can redeem for rewards!

Let the roommate competition toward the cleanest and most organized space begin!

This next app is exclusively for those of you who have stellar relationships with your roommates. I’m talking SpongeBob and Patrick best friends inharmony kind of stellar. If that isn’t you and your roomie, you might want to reconsider this one.

Chooserr will allow you to turn a bleak and depressing task like assigning chores and divvying up expenses and turn it into a game. The game is simple. First, you have to create the task. It could be something as simple as “Who should have control over the TV remote for the next hour?” or something as dastardly as “Who should scrub out the toilet this week?”

Chooserr will pick the winner (or loser) to make sure that the results are completely unbiased. Another way to play is with “Not It!” This mode encourages a little bit of competition. First, you create the task, but the last person to press “Not It!” is the loser. The app will allow up to three friends (unlimited for $0.99!) to compete.

Group chat messengers also add to the experience where you can gloat or whine about the results.

Nothing is worse than coming home from the grocery store to find that the milk has just run out, or someone drank the last sip of juice in the house. Even if this is not something you have personally experienced, anyone can agree that keeping track of groceries in a shared household can be a challenge.

Fortunately for us, OurGroceries is here to bridge the gap. The app creates a single grocery list for the entire household and every member of the household has the ability to make changes to this list. Once a change is made, everyone in the household sees it.

For instance, imagine that you’ve just left for class and you’ve taken the last protein bar in the box. You can use OurGroceries to indicate that the household needs more protein bars. Someone else in your household could be at the store where they will pick up more protein bars and perhaps whatever else is on the list. It’s a perfectly simple way to make sure you and your roommates have whatever you need to keep your pantry stocked.

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Tamiera is a senior at Florida State University, studying Editing, Writing & Media and Digital Media Production. When she's not geeking out about movies and puppy videos, she's on her way to a career in screenwriting, while working intensely to finish a few novels before graduation. Besides writing, Tamiera is otherwise obsessed with Coldplay, feminism, dystopian novels, and various types of junk food. She hopes to see one of her works on the silver screen and eventually finish an entire tube of Chapstick.